It’s real, if unquantifiable. It’s ongoing, if unpredictable.
Could it be the latest — and last — external threat to this Yankees season? Or, conversely, their salvation?
Therein lies the mystery of championship hangover. No one knows precisely what to make of it, or how to overcome it. The only clear mistake would be to ignore or refute it.
“It’s a topic we discussed in the offseason, given that four of the last five winners didn’t make the playoffs the next year and the one that did [Chicago] got off to a slow start,” Jeff Luhnow, the Astros’ president of baseball operations, wrote Friday in a text message. “A.J. [Hinch] and I did everything we could to focus the team on this year and put last year behind us.”
The defending champion Astros, managed by Hinch, have performed well enough in a vacuum; their 74-49 record just two games behind their 2017 pace. Last year’s 76-47 mark, however, gave them a comfortable, 13-game AL West advantage over the Angels. This time, they find themselves tied with the upstart A’s after dropping their second straight game to Oakland on Saturday, 7-1. The Mariners, meanwhile, stood in the picture, too, four behind entering their late Saturday game with the Dodgers.
Could you have envisioned a rematch of last year’s ALCS being held … in this year’s wild-card game? Yankees-Astros for that AL kickoff, win-or-go-home affair looks quite feasible at this juncture.
Major League Baseball hasn’t crowned a repeat champion since the Yankees won three straight World Series from 1998-2000. That 17-year run of non-consecutive titles marks the longest in baseball history, and if the Astros don’t repeat this fall, then an 18-year stretch would tie the North American professional sports record set in the NHL from 1999 (after the Red Wings enjoyed parades in ’97 and ’98) through 2016 (when the Penguins won their first of two straight).
Only the NBA regularly sees dynasties nowadays, and you could easily attribute that to the sport’s nature — with three or even two generational players, you’re off to the races. It has been a far different story for baseball, hockey and football, where the Patriots last pulled off the repeat in 2004 and 2005, and even we laymen can reasonably postulate two reasons behind this:
1) The rise of analytics has flattened the playing field.
2) The rise of media, particularly social media, has elevated every component of the championship experience and led to understandable fatigue ex post facto.
Think of the Astros’ wild ride last year: Their surge out of the gate, their quiet non-waivers trade deadline and their subsequent August tumble (11-17), Hurricane Harvey’s damage to the Houston area, the Aug. 31 acquisition of Justin Verlander and seven-game battles with the Yankees in the ALCS and Dodgers in the World Series.
Throw in that it took the Astros 56 years of existence to get one of these, and that further intensifies the experience, including the celebrations afterward.
The 2016 Cubs, who won the franchise’s first title in 108 years, had an even bigger party and felt the effects, as Luhnow referenced. They didn’t climb over .500 for good until the 91st game of the season. They advanced to their third straight NLCS before petering out against the Dodgers, and that marked the first time a defending champion made the semifinals since the 2012 Cardinals dropped the NLCS to the Giants.
As Luhnow noted, the four champions between the ’11 Cardinals and ’16 Cubs — the ’12 Giants, ’13 Red Sox, ’14 Giants and ’15 Royals — watched the following postseason from home.
The Astros tried to combat this syndrome partly be importing some important new players — like starting pitcher Gerrit Cole and relievers Hector Rondon and Joe Smith — then reinforced that further last month with catcher Martin Maldonado and relievers Ryan Pressly and Roberto Osuna — the latter of whom served a 75-game suspension for violating baseball’s domestic violence protocol and still has a criminal case pending.
And again, they’d be just fine if not for those meddling A’s and Mariners. Shoot, they’ve reached this juncture despite their position-playing corps experiencing considerably more turbulence — with reigning AL Most Valuable Player Jose Altuve, shortstop Carlos Correa, catcher Brian McCann and center fielder George Springer all spending time on the disabled list.
The Yankees surely can appreciate the importance of their world being shaped by outside forces. They’ve been on a 100-ish-win pace for a while, only to trail the historic Red Sox by multiple furlongs. They banked on a frontline starting pitcher being available in July and found that not to be the case.
You wouldn’t like the Yankees’ chances against Verlander or Cole in a wild-card game, right? Though you wouldn’t necessarily give either club a mental edge because both teams would be a little punch-drunk after falling short of their preseason expectations — unlike, say, the A’s or Mariners, both of whom would be playing with house money in that contest.
“Our division is tougher this year, so we still have our work cut out for us,” Luhnow wrote, “but we have every bit as strong a team this year as we did last year, and our guys want it badly.”
Can they find another gear amid their hangover? The Yankees, who seem to be dealing with the worst kind of hangover — one achieved without the high of a championship — will monitor their foes curiously, surely not sure which way they’ll want it to conclude yet rooting, ultimately, for baseball’s repeat-free streak to keep going.
